Rich Internet Applications are applications that communicate with one another. Part of the management of Rich Internet Applications includes dealing with the demand for constant communication between applications, dealing with any requirements for low latency or real time communications, and content issues. The content issues are especially relevant with client-side content, where the client side content of the Rich Internet Application is updated frequently in response to instructions from a server component.
Current solutions may rely on proprietary server/client frameworks that require licensing or have difficulty scaling. Another current solution relies on a periodic polling mechanism, where each of a set of distributed web-browser based applications must make repeated requests to the server to get the information about the other users, as well as post their own recent actions. These solutions suffer from a number of issues. They tend to lack customizability, in that they offer a limited amount of customization in the amount and type of information that can be passed between the web browser based Rich Internet Applications and the server components of the system. The also tend to have speed limitations, in that they do not provide real-time communication between the server and the web-browser-based UIs. The latency, or delay in sending and receiving information provides lower performance. Most current solutions limit the total number of participants to a relatively small number, and lack any method of scaling to larger numbers of users. Some of the current solutions require the installation of a proprietary server module to integrate the messaging protocol, and the use of this proprietary server can limit interoperability with other proprietary or non-proprietary systems. Finally, some of these prior solutions require expensive server components, introducing cost limitations.
There is therefore a need to solve the problem of coordinating the actions of numerous widely distributed web application users. A system and method is needed that integrates Rich Internet Applications while at the same time solving scalability, performance, customizability, interoperability and cost issues.